Watch | ‘Without H-1B, US scientific establishment would collapse’: Physicist Michio Kaku’s warning

More than a decade before US President Donald Trump began his crackdown on H1B visa, American scientist Michio Kaku warned that the American scientific established would collapse without the H1B visa programme. He dubbed it the genius visa programme.

Amid far-right pressure, Trump has raised the H1B visa fee to $100,000 in a bid to discourage immigrants. The H-1B programme allows American employers to employ foreign workers in the United States for specialised roles. It is used widely by tech companies like Amazon and Google that employ thousands of Indians.

In a video from even before Trump’s first term, Kaku, a well-known physicist and author, said that there would be no Silicon Valley without H1B and any crackdown on H1B would lead to Silicon Valley’s rivals propping in countries like India and China.

Kaku said, “America has a secret weapon. That secret weapon is the H1B. Without the H1B, the scientific establishment of this country would collapse. Forget about Google, forget about Silicon Valley. There would be no Silicon Valley without the H1B. And you know what the H1B is? It’s the genius visa.”

Kaku went on to say that foreign-born scientists were not just the driving force behind the US innovation but create entire industries.

Kaku further said, “You realise that in the United States, 50 per cent of all PhD candidates are foreign-born. At my system, one of the biggest in the United States, 100 per cent of the PhD candidates are foreign born. The United States is a magnet sucking up all the brains of the world. But now the brains are going back. They’re going back to China, they’re going back to India and people are saying, ‘Oh my God, there’s a Silicon Valley in India now. Oh my God, there’s a Silicon Valley in China.’ Duh! Where did it come from? It came from the United States. So, don’t tell me the science isn’t the engine of prosperity. You remove the H1B visa and you collapse the economy.”

More than a decade later, Kaku’s warning has become the United States’ reality as scientists and scholars have already started moving out of the country for other countries like Canada and China amid Trump’s crackdown on immigrants and his far-right allies’ anti-immigrant agenda.

For many years, anti-immigrant voices in the United States have slammed the H-1B programme as a means of taking away jobs from Americans and giving them away to foreigners. However, Kaku pointed out that H1B visa-holders were doing advance jobs that no American could. Instead of taking away jobs, he said that H1B visa-holders create jobs and drive entire industries.